When Ethel Wilson published her first novel, Hetty Dorval, she was in her sixtieth year. With her subsequent books, among them the widely read Swamp Angel (1954), she established herself as one of Canada's most important writers. Although she fostered a reputation for being an unambitious latecomer, a happily married doctor's wife who wrote for her own pleasure, she in fact took her writing very seriously, trying for several years...